


Clove Oil

by Eremiss



Series: Guinevere Ashe [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 2.X, Aether theory, BSing magic theory, Even though you don't get it, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Friendship, Healing Magic, Listening because you know THEY'RE interested, Magic Theory, Play stupid games win stupid prizes, Talking, When the quiet one starts rambling, nerding out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:07:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24207178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eremiss/pseuds/Eremiss
Summary: Contrary to popular belief, the Warrior of Lightcanprattle on. She just needs the right topic and a willing ear. Yda is willing to listen.
Relationships: Yda Hext & Warrior of Light
Series: Guinevere Ashe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632004
Kudos: 11





	Clove Oil

It’s not that Yda has never asked Gwen for help, rather… she’s never asked her for healing. While Gwen had studied conjury for a few years in the past, and regularly practiced the special brand of white magic employed by Red Mages, there are many other Scions who are far more gifted with healing magics, and more skilled at assessing injuries. Typically she only needs to employ her healing magics while out on assignment, either alone or partnered with others who had no healing abilities of their own.

Which makes Yda coming to her in the middle of the Stones with a look of distress (on the lower half of her face, at least) and clutching her swollen, bruised jaw rather… strange? On second thought, perhaps ‘strange’ is too strong of a word. Still, it’s certainly not typical.

“Can you take a look? Maybe patch it up?” Yda asks, squeezing the words out between her teeth and trying not to move her jaw.

Gwen flounders for a second, equally confused and concerned. What happened? Had she been punched? And wouldn’t she be better off asking Y’shtola or Coultenet? Perhaps they’re out on their own assignments–though the moment she thinks it she knows that doesn’t sound right. 

Yda is standing there, staring beseechingly.

Gwen pushes the confusion aside for the moment and nods, “Yes, of course. Come on.”

Once they reach her room Gwen waves Yda into the chair at her desk and steps into her bathroom to scrub her hands. “Where does it hurt? Just your jaw? Your teeth?”

Yda makes a considering face and shifts her jaw around, immediately wincing. “Both.” 

Gwen offers a sympathetic look and quiet hum, moving to the bookshelf crowded with jars. She plucks up one of the dark brown vials and one of the scraps of cotton piled nearby, only half-hearing Yda wondering what she’s doing.

“It’s for your teeth,” Gwen replies, carefully pouring a bit of pungent oil onto the cotton. She sets the vial aside, turns, and pauses.

Yda blinks at her. “Hm?”

“Is it alright if I…?” Gwen asks, trailing off and gesturing vaguely with her hands. Most healing involved some form of touching, and Yda is a very tactile and touchy person anyway, so it’s probably fine. Still, it never hurts to make sure, even if it does make Gwen feel a tad awkward.

“Uhh? Oh! Oh, yeah.” Yda starts to nod, then arrests the motion with another wince. “Yeah, sure, poke and prod away, I don’t mind.”

Gwen relaxes a little, “Alright. Open your mouth.” She delicately holds Yda’s chin and tilts her head up for better light, peering into her mouth and confirming that the brawler hadn’t lost any teeth. She daintily tucks the cotton between Yda’s cheek and back molars and quickly withdraws, “The taste is a bit strong, but it will help.” 

Yda closes her mouth, pulling another face as the taste gets to her. “What is this?” she asks thickly.

“Clove oil.“ Despite her efforts Gwen had gotten a bit on her fingers, and she knew the smell would linger for days. That was preferable to needing to make use of the oil herself, though. While it did wonders for numbing toothaches, the flavor was so potent it could be difficult to stand.

Yda’s face scrunches more, then abruptly relaxes a little. “Oh. Feels better already,” she says, sounding surprised.

Gwen smiles to herself, satisfied, and moves to rifle through her haphazardly stacked training weapons. _Weapon rack. Need to get a weapon rack,_ she tells herself. “So, now that you’re feeling a bit better,” she says over her shoulder, “why don’t you tell me why you came to me instead of Y’shtola?”

Yda makes a strangled little sound. “Wh-what? What do you mean?”

Her yew wand is at the bottom of the stack, right where she left it. Despite being buried for more than a moon, the magically preserved leaves are still a bright, lively green. Gwen lightly touches them, drawing on the calm, steady aether inside the living wand. “I’m not a particularly advanced healer,” she says, “and, unless my days are mixed up, Y’shtola should be here. We both know she’s more skilled with healing magics than I am, but you came to me instead. I’m just curious why.”

Yda pouts, her expression wrinkling when she swallows another mouthful of clove flavor. 

Gwen cocks her head to one side, eyeing Yda meaningfully. “Surely she didn’t turn you away, right?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Yda relents with a sigh. She’s speaking more easily already, though the cotton in her cheek is still distorting a few syllables. She drops her chin a little and mumbles something under her breath.

Gwen prompts, “Hm?” hovering a hand over Yda’s bruised cheek. Her vision slips out of focus as she concentrates, drawing on the aether of her wand and pushing it through Yda’s jaw to assess the damage.

“She… told me not to mess with those new automated training dummies,” she grumbles again, only a bit more audibly.

 _Bruised muscles, burst blood vessels…_ When the words finally manage to break through her haze of preoccupation they take an extra few seconds to register. Gwen distractedly asks, “The… ones that the Ironworks is making? Aren’t they still being tested?”

Yda pouts mildly, careful of her jaw. “I haven’t seen anyone do anything to them in a sennight. They’re just sitting there in the training yard, fully assembled…” She starts to lift a hand to her jaw and stops, “Don’t know what still needs to be done to them, because they definitely work.”

“Ah.” _A small crack in the bone, swollen gums… And the blow loosened a few of her teeth._ “So I take it you didn’t heed her advice, then.”

Yda doesn’t answer, which is an answer in itself.

Gwen has also noticed that the Ironworks’ constructs have gone unattended the last few days. Truth be told, she was also curious about the new ‘advanced’ training dummies; but, apparently, not as curious as Yda. “Hm… Well, if it makes you feel any better,” she assures, “I don’t plan on telling her. Or anyone.” 

Yda brightens immediately, “Really?” 

Gwen grins, “Though Y’shtola is rather intimidating, so that might not hold under duress.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think anyone would hold under that,” Yda says with a giggle, palpably relieved. “Only person who’s scarier is Tataru, I think.”

Gwen hasn’t personally seen the diminutive receptionist intimidate anyone, but between the stories she’s heard and the occasional steely glint in Tataru’s eye, it isn’t hard to imagine.

She pushes that aside, concentrating and murmuring an incantation. As the spell takes shape she reaches out, starting with the cracked bone and working out from there.

Thankfully, the damage the Ironworks’ dummy inflicted isn’t severe, so it doesn’t take long to mend. The bruise, though, will linger.

As Gwen completes her spell Yda cranes her head a little to one side so she can peer at the yew wand. “So why the wand? Don’t you normally use your sword and focus for magic?”

“Yes, but,” Gwen says slowly, letting go of the last of her concentration so her thoughts could start coming back to her. “But it’s… not as efficient, you could say?”

Yda makes a curious noise. “It casts magic fine, right? That’s why you use it.”

“Well, yes, red mage foci are made to work with both white and black magic, but,” Gwen pauses again, considering. 

Now that she no longer has to devote most of her concentration to spellcasting she can use it to formulate an answer. The principles of magic foci and their uses are all but engraved into her brain after her studies in conjury, thaumaturgy and red magic, not to mention how often the concepts have been rehashed and reiterated in all the texts she’s poured through.

“But I’ve found they’re not… They’re sort of ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of none’, you could say. They’re unique in being able to aid with both thaumaturgy and conjury, but, given how they aren’t specialized, spells can sometimes require more –more focus and effort– from the caster in order to work on the same level as a more specialized, single-discipline focus. That flexibility is what makes them special and versatile, but, well, everything has its drawbacks. I’m still learning red magic, so I’m sure I have room to improve. I’m better with offensive red magic, too, so when it comes to healing,” she shrugs, smiling absently, “plain old conjury is just…a little easier. Maybe once I’ve studied and trained more that will change.”

Yda makes a thoughtful sound, tapping her fingers against her chin. She’s still sporting a (possibly incriminating) bruise on her cheek, but the blemish has lost its hard edges and the color has softened and faded to brown.

As Gwen sets about putting away the oil and nudging over a wastebin so Yda can dispose of the oil-soaked cotton she adds, “I’ve actually been trying to come up with a way to make a different weapon and focus that would be… more efficient than the gems I’ve used so far. Actually it was just a flight of fancy at first, but it’s all turned out to be quite interesting so I decided to more seriously pursue it. The refreshers on foci and basic techniques I’ve gotten along the way has been helpful, too.

“It’s a bit beyond me, honestly, seeing how there’s so much to take into consideration, and I’m not much of a craftsman or scholar. But I understand the basic principles, at least, so I’ve been able to muddle along. X’hrun has been a huge help, but he’s got his hands full, so I’ve been doing most of the research myself. Heh, at the very least he’s told me he thinks it’s worth pursuing, and that I’m not basically reinventing the wheel… sometimes it feels like a near thing, though, heh.”

Laying it out gets things moving in her head again, allowing thoughts and facts that have gone stagnant to shift, fit themselves together and lie flat rather than filling her head like crumpled papers in an overflowing wastebin. After how long she’s spent pouring over books and papers by herself, it’s refreshing to air out the clutter.

“When making a singular, more optimized focus started to seem a bit infeasible I thought maybe I could find a way to utilize different foci for white and black magic. Similar results but, perhaps a less complicated means of getting there. Except, from what I’ve been reading, trying to combine two foci into one cohesive weapon, especially ones that behave so differently, will probably be just as difficult. As it stands now, I’m not even sure which method is likely to work better, or at all. So I’m pursuing both, which is… a bit of a handful.

“The whole process is proving to be much more nuanced, complex and time consuming than I’d initially expected either way.” She shrugs again, “Ah, well. Nothing to do but keep working on it.”

Yda is silent for a moment before saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk this much.”

“Ah…?” Gwen pauses, thoughts of scribbled theories and early sketches of weapon designs abruptly turning to dust and slipping through her fingers. Her voice instinctively shrinks down in her throat as embarrassment prickles up her spine. She… had gotten a bit rambly, hadn’t she? Her head is so chock-full of research, questions and ideas that it’s fit to burst, so once the words had started flowing they’d just… kept going, and she hadn’t thought to stop them. “Oh, sorry, erm…”

“No, no, I don’t mean stop!” Yda says quickly, flapping her hands. “Keep going! So you’re designing a new focus? Is this why you’ve been locked up in your room?”

Gwen hesitates, feeling telltale heat on her face, “Well, uh… A new focus and weapon, actually.” The phrase ‘locked up in your room’ catches up to her and she pouts. The piles of notes and research that have accumulated on and around her desk discourage her from protesting. “It’s proving to be a bigger undertaking than I first thought, like I said,” she hedges. “So I suppose I… have been keeping to my room a bit.” 

“Because it’s gotten complicated, yeah? Why?”

Even though Yda is only being encouraging, the fluster that had initially made Gwen lose her train of thought lingers, coming undone in fits and starts rather than simply lifting away. But it _is_ leaving, helped by the reassuring notion that Yda is genuinely interested despite the fact that she isn’t given to using magic. Just to make sure, Gwen asks, “I, uh, didn’t think you cared much about magics?”

“I don’t, but I can listen. I don’t mind being a sounding board,” she replies with a broad smile. “It’s the least I can do after you patched me up. Plus, it’s got you chattering! I didn’t know you had it in you!”

“I,” Gwen almost sputters, face heating a little more, “I’m not _chattering_ …”

“So go on, tell me about it,” Yda urges, leaning slightly forward in her seat and waiting with blatant interest.

Gwen tugs at her hair, glancing abashedly aside as she tries to find where she’d left off. “Ah, well… The thing is there’s not much more to tell. Yet. I’m still researching, and there’s a lot of information to sift through. X’hrun has been helping through letters, and he’s promised to send me whatever resources and research he finds that might be of use. There really isn’t a whole lot beyond that, aside from my notes…” She winds her fingers through her hair, shifting her weight to her left foot. “The sketches and drafts I’ve made are… Well, hopefully they’ll be useful somehow, but mostly they’re sort of just for fun.”

“So it’s still at the start, but it’s promising, right?” Yda asks, “You think you can get somewhere with it?”

Gwen considers that and eventually shrugs. “Somewhere. Eventually. But it’s hard to say exactly where, or how long it will take to get there. It’s hard to predict how well it will all work out in the end–or if it will work at all.”

Yda fishes the cotton out of her mouth and tosses it in the trash. “It might not?”

“Maybe. This is… new territory, more or less. The schools of magic tend to keep to themselves, even though it’s documented in the past that they’ve cooperated–which is how red magic came about in the first place. None of the literature,” she waves a hand at the books and papers spread out over her desk, “I’ve found so far has really touched on this sort of thing much. I’ve hardly read all the books in the Realm, I know, but a lot of it is, heh, starting to sound like variations on the same tune. Most of the talk about foci, in particular, is spent pointing out the differences between them, and why different materials are suited for some schools of magic but not others. In-depth, practical analysis and comparisons between thaumaturgy and conjury in use, rather than conjecture from just one side or surface-level observations, is surprisingly hard to come by. Finding information about using them together, outside of something like red magic, is proving especially difficult.”

Gwen taps her chin with one finger, smiling slightly at the folly of it. “I even tried delving a bit into arcanima and grimoires to see if I might find something useful there; maybe get inspiration, or find some way to use things like enchanted inks or geometric engravings to… bridge the gap, so to speak. Or, failing that, I’d hoped a third perspective on magic and foci to compare everything to might give me an idea, or something. Bit of a shot in the dark, but you never know until you try. But, well,” she shakes her head ruefully, “arcanima and geometries, erm… They don’t come to me as naturally as the other magics, and it takes some work to get my head around them. Maybe they’d make more sense with more practice, but, hah, I kind of have my hands full.”

Gwen can’t see Yda’s eyes, but she’s imagining they’re probably glazed over by now. One can only listen so intently to rambling on a topic they, themselves, can’t make much use of before it begins to simply become noise.

She turns her hands palm up, “In short, it’s a bigger, more complex undertaking than I first expected, and I’m going to be mostly on my own for a lot of it. It all might not work like I initially envisioned–or it might not work at all, but it’s difficult to say just yet. I’ve just got to keep working.”

Yda nods more astutely than Gwen expected, and starts idly kicking her feet. “Sounds to me like you might be better off finding out by doing. Even if you aren’t sure how it will all come together and work out in the end, you’ve probably found out enough to put to use and make something if you wanted. Maybe you could look into getting a test weapon made? Use it as a trial run to test things out, and then go from there.”

It’s reassuring to know she hasn’t yet succeeded in alienating her audience, and the self-consciousness beginning to tighten across her shoulders abruptly eases. “Well, yes, technically. I could commission guilds for the different foci and the blade and they’ve got crafters skilled enough to meet with whatever specifications I need. I could have started out with that instead of diving into books–or fewer books, at least. But, once I had all the parts to make it, I’d need to find someone skilled enough to put it together and integrate all the parts into a practical, physically and aetherically cohesive weapon. Each person would have to be quite skilled, particularly the one who puts it all together in the end.” 

Gwen stretches her fingers and smooths down her coat with an airy laugh and a little sigh. “All that to say, it’s safe to assume no aspect of the project will be cheap. And, well…” She trailed off, debating how best to phrase it. “Financing one weapon, whenever I get to that point, will probably require some forethought and planning. But multiple iterations, refining the design as I go along?”

Yda tilts her head with a mild frown, “I didn’t think about that…”

Gwen plucks the vial of clove oil from her desk and puts it back in its place. “Some things can’t be learned without doing, but I’d rather spend time nitpicking and refining beforehand, rather than go into debt or be stuck with a flawed prototype.”

Yda nods with a thoughtful hum. She folds her arms and tips her head back to regard the ceiling, pondering. “I bet Urianger and Papalymo could help with all of that, including those ‘unique specifications.’”

Gwen hadn’t considered asking her fellow Scions for their input, which… thinking about it now was perhaps a bit silly. She was accustomed to handling tasks and projects herself, particularly when they were personal, like this, but she didn’t have to anymore. While she was still working on being close with the other Scions, they were still colleagues, and they endeavored to help one another. 

It couldn’t hurt to at least ask.

At length she nods, “Maybe they could.”

**Author's Note:**

> Combined beta-ing by @rhymingteelookatme @phaedra-mero, @anomaliewrites and @evangeline-cross! Thanks guys!! :DD
> 
> Endings, what even are they anyway
> 
> Clove Oil, aka: Gwen is both a do-it-yourself’er and a nerd.   
> When Gwen wants to do something her first go-to is experience and example (her own, or someone else’s) and when that won’t suffice, she gets her research on. If possible, she likes doing it all at once (or as much of it as possible) so she won’t forget or mis-remember as much, so all-nighters surrounded by books are pretty standard.  
> In her pre-Scion years she would make use of any public and Guild resources that were available, and would barter with money or labor for more specialized books, tools, research and information. Over the years this method of problem solving caused her to slowly accumulate a collection of books on a relatively wide range of topics (botany and herbal medicines being the definite majority). She brought the collection with her when she moved into the Sands / Stones.  
> Now she has the Scion’s library (among others) to draw from whenever she wants, too! She’s pretty excited about it haha  
> For how little she likes sitting around, she has no trouble getting lost in books, even when they’re a bit beyond her (that’s where stubbornness/determination come in) 
> 
> ~~Clove Oil, aka: Gwen is both a do-it-yourself’er and a _nerd_ , aka: _Scuse me while I bullshit about aether and magic and stuff_~~ lmao.  
>  ~~I have no idea if anything Gwen is saying makes any sense lore wise, I don’t even know if any of what she’s trying to do is even remotely necessary, but it IS something she would do, and all that rambling made sense in my head, sooo…~~ XDD


End file.
